Nodes such as server platforms, client stations, peer stations, and intermediate station nodes in current communication systems typically must select a single channel or single link or other communication interface incident to undertaking a data transfer transaction or a so-called “use case” (essentially, one or more transactions or constituent use cases directed to a common goal), such as the wireless transmission of multimedia data or the downloading of a Web page. This is so even though the nodes themselves might be capable of communicating over a number of diverse channels or links.
The goal—the use case—is the downloading of the page. But it entails around seventy hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) transactions, each of which might in turn entail one or more TCP transactions. The various parts of the use case—in this case, the various HTTP and TCP transactions—might have various class of service (COS) requirements, e.g., different latency requirements and/or different bandwidth requirements and/or different error quality requirements, to name three COS variables, yet only a single communication link will be chosen for the entire use case.
From the above discussion, it can be appreciated that the selection of the channel or link might be independent of the COS requirements of the transaction or use case to be fulfilled. For instance, as mentioned above a client station typically selects a statically configured link for all communications with the Internet that is independent of any particular transaction or use case that is to be fulfilled. The particular selection might be based only on a desire to obtain the channel that has a COS which provides a highest overall communication quality without regard to actual needs for a particular transaction, or to obtain the lowest cost channel without regard to actual quality needs for a particular transaction. In any case, this “one size fits all” circumstance is based in part on the desire to avoid the complexity that would attend layering communication protocols together, a technique that has been used for making a link (such as a satellite link) perform better than it otherwise would.
The present invention recognizes that not only do different transactions/use cases have different COS requirements, but different portions of a single transaction/use case might have differing COS requirements. To continue with the above Web page use case example in a bit more detail, the user computer ordinarily has a low latency COS demand for HTTP transactions related to establishing a connection with a server, but, once connected, subsequent HTTP transactions might have high-bandwidth, latency insensitive COS as data (such as multimedia data) is communicated from the server to the user. As recognized by the present invention, using just one channel having a single set of COS characteristics for both portions of the use case results in inefficiencies in the use of the communication capabilities of clients, servers, and other nodes in modern communication systems.